Virtual Staging
When you add digitally created furniture and decorations to an empty room photograph it is called virtual staging. This is becoming widely used in the real estate industry to add interest to otherwise boring photographs of rooms. Rooms in a home, commercial office, or rental property. While this may be appealing to increase the engagement of a dull photo of a home for sale, it can come with potential legal ramifications.
U. S. Copyright Law
Most professional architectural and real estate photographs are owned by their creator, i.e., the professional photographer or photography company. Although the photographer may not specifically tell a client that this is the case, United States and other countries Copyright Laws automatically grant copyright ownership to the creator when the photos are taken. The Copyright Law, in essence, says that: all photographs are automatically copyrighted by their creator when they are shot and cannot be reproduced or altered in any way without the permission of their creator. Most photographers do not give up copyright ownership of their images.
A Typical Situation
Let’s say, you are a realtor and you hire a professional photographer to shoot photographs of an empty house you are listing for sale. Later you want to virtually stage some of the rooms to make the listing photos more interesting. So you go to a website that offers virtual staging and have them create new images from the professional photographer’s original photos. They will probably add virtual furniture and wall decorations. Now you replace the old, bare room photos with the new, virtually staged photos in your real estate listing on the Internet.
MLS Rules
As required by most MLS rules, you must state in the listing that the new photos are virtually staged.
The Bigger Problem
You now have a legal problem. You just violated U. S. Copyright laws because you altered the original photos without the creators permission. You could be subjecting yourself, your agency and the company that created the virtually staged photos to a lawsuit and monetary damages for copyright infringement. If any or all of the images were registered with the U. S. Copyright Office by their creator previous to the violation, it’s even worse. The monetary award to the professional photographer or photography company could be massive. As much as $100,000 or more for each instance of violation.
My Best Advice
Get written permission to do the virtual staging from the professional photographer who made the photographs. Better yet, have the original photographer do the virtual staging for you. We will only virtually stage our own images and will not do so to other photographer’s works.
Since we are photographers and not lawyers, please consult a copyright attorney if you have any concerns or questions.